Corporate Europe chilled by Enron-style scandal

It has already been dubbed Parmasplat, and Europe's Enron. The Securities and Exchange Commission has called it: "One of the largest and most brazen corporate financial frauds in history."

The sheer scale of the scandal - what started as a €4bn black hole in the food company's accounts has a liability now said to be somewhere north of €10bn - that has engulfed the Italian food maker and the pace at which it has unfolded has left Italy gasping for breath and Parmalat's founder, Calisto Tanzi, under arrest.

But if Parmalat was to prove the main event, corporate Europe was not without the odd warm-up act in the Scandals of 2003. Skandia, one of Sweden's top financial services groups, parted company with several of its senior management team amid allegations of excessive bonuses and company money being used to renovate private appartments.

Skandia was not the only European corporate to feel the cold breath of financial scan dal. Step forward Dutch retailer Ahold which early in the year found a $880m hole in the accounts of a US subsidiary.

Still it was not all bad news: 2003 has been a good year for the euro. On the foreign exchanges it has hit record highs against the dollar.

The strength of the euro was more a feature of the dollar's weakness but it was all the more surprising because, according to the European commission, it should not have happened at all. After all, according to many of the euro-zone's great and good, the euro's credibility hinged on the stability and growth pact. Break the pact and the currency, maybe even the whole concept of the union, would be undermined.

Yet Germany and France did break the rules - refusing to rein in their public sector deficits for fear of suffocating sickly economic growth. And the disaster failed to happen.

Not that the euro quite had things all its own way. Back in September Sweden showed that while the forex markets might love the euro a majority of its citizens did not. A referendum on whether the country should sing up for the single currency came up with the answer "no" - a blow to Sweden's political and economic establishment.

Pierre Bilger, the former boss of French engineering group Alstom, could reasonably claim a place among the year's losers. Mr Bilger lost his job, departing the group in March clutching a €3.8m pay-off. But come August, and after some virulent criticism Mr Bilger announced he was returning the money, saying that he did not want to become an ob ject of scandal for Alstom's workforce. Sadly Mr Bilger's decency does not look like setting a trend. It took the US Securities and Exchange Commission to persaude former Vivendi boss Jean-Marie Messier that his claim for a $25m pay-off was just not on.

It has been a better year for Jean-Rene Fourtou, the man brought in to replace Messier as the head of Vivendi Universal. He has spent 2003 restructuring a balance sheet undermined by his expansionist predecessor and can reflect on progress made.